All photos © Mirko Lux. Used with permission. If you wish to re-use any of these photos please contact Mirko!
Matteo Renzi has an idea: train Eurocrats in Italy, as a way to boost Italy’s influence in the EU. Possibly a good idea. He wants that place to be Santo Stefano. That’s a really bad idea. Yes, nearby Ventotene was where Altiero Spinelli was imprisoned, and where he penned the...
Danny Yadron in The Guardian today wrote a piece entitled “Why do normal people struggle with Twitter?” that, via a conversation with Mathieu, drove me to write this piece. For Yadron’s alludes to an issue that has not been afforded much attention during Twitter’s current woes – namely the very...
For the first time in the academic year 2015-16 I am a member of the faculty of the politics department at the College of Europe in Bruges. My own MA is from the College of Europe (in 2003-04) and it is good to be back there as a teacher this...
Yesterday one of the initiators of the “Volksentscheid Fahrrad” in Berlin came to make a presentation at my local Grüne party meeting. The campaign initiators want to use Berlin’s direct democracy systems to put 10 major changes to Berlin cycle infrastructure into law – these include some pretty major infrastructure...
Just over two years ago I joined the Grüne in Germany. My reasons at the time I outlined here. But how has the experience been so far? Reporting about it has been largely absent from my blog and I only tweet about my party political work very sporadically. This blog...
At the height of the Eurozone bailout crisis, Alexis Tsipras went to address the European Parliament. Why bother with that? was the cry of sceptical journalists who have never paid attention to the European Parliament. 887000 viewers of Guy Verhofstadt’s response show that this was a worthwhile political exercise –...
Obergrenze. It’s the word of the moment in Germany – namely should Germany set an upper limit on the number of refugees that it can take in 2016. CSU leader Seehofer wants to set it at 200000. The Austrians have agreed one (but there are questions if it can work),...
Ska Keller retweeted this from Spiegel Online journalist Markus Becker earlier: Polish government requested names of all accredited journalists from @EUparliament https://t.co/2ofkNXxq2k #PiS #Poland — Markus Becker (@MarkusBecker) January 21, 2016 The insinuation is that – having purged the Warsaw press, the government of Poland is about to try to...
Charlie Hebdo has everyone up in arms with their latest cartoon. People have variously said they are enraged, that it is racist, that it is disgusting. For me it most definitely is not funny, but it encompasses such complicated contradictions in one image, in such a painful way, that I...
When was the last time you talked to someone who’d been attacked with bottles in Saxony? Who’d fled from police through a Hungarian forest? Someone who talked with sadness in their face about a friend who was never the same after seeing a baby killed before his eyes? That’s the...
Back in July I made a first compilation of Youtube films about the European Union, in German, that were actually very funny. You can see those here. Now, thanks to Publixphere, here are a few more. Enjoy! Showdown in Brüssel: Sonneborn vs. Oettinger Everyone’s favourite Digital Commissioner was subjected to...